Kaito blinked awake, his cheek peeling off a drawing stuck to his desk. Dried ink. His neck screamed in protest from sleeping slumped in his chair again. The room was dim in the early morning light, his desk a disaster zone – notes, empty mugs, printouts everywhere. In the center of the chaos, his tablet glowed faintly, displaying the title page: Aelric the Last Flame (The Chosen Light). The book. Always the book.
"Nii-chan?" A soft voice came from the hallway. "You didn't sleep again?"
Kaito sat up straighter, rubbing the stiffness from his neck and the ink smudge from his cheek. "I was... resting." Even he didn't believe it.
The door opened, revealing his younger sister, Ayane, already dressed in her neat school uniform. Her expression was a mix of worry and mild annoyance as she surveyed the desk, then him. With a familiar sigh, she came over and placed a mug of hot tea beside his keyboard.
"You promised not to overdo it," she clarified, emphasizing the second part.
"I know. Sorry." He gratefully took the mug. The warmth felt good.
"Let me guess," Ayane said, nodding towards the tablet. "Analyzing the book again?"
Kaito glanced at his notes – flowcharts, timelines, lists of pros and cons that looked more like a business analysis than literary critique. "Sort of," he admitted. "I'm trying to figure out why Aelric lost. The book says he had a System, good allies, everything going for him... but he still failed at the end. It doesn't make sense. There's a pattern I'm missing."
Ayane gave him that look – the one that said she loved him but thought he was slightly crazy. "You do know he's fictional, right?
He managed a weak smile. "Sometimes I wonder."
She walked over to the meticulously organized bookshelf – his one concession to order in the room. It held analytical books, software architecture books and etc. and of course, printed forum threads debating the book's ending, critical analyses, even the few cryptic, anonymous 'author notes' that had surfaced years ago before vanishing. The original ebook itself had arrived mysteriously – an unsolicited email months ago from a sender simply named 'Archivist', the address stubbornly unreplyable. The attached file, Aelric the Last Flame (The Chosen Light), had consumed him ever since he'd finally opened and read it. His obsession wasn't just reading; it was archival, analytical. He treated the book, its unknown author, and its strange appearance like a cold case.
"Okay, Mr. Detective," Ayane sighed, grabbing her backpack from the floor where it leaned against a stack of printouts. "Just... eat something that doesn't come from a packet today? Please? And text me if Aelric sends you any postcards from the afterlife."
"I will." The promise felt automatic.
"Promise?" Her eyes held his for a second longer than necessary.
"Promise."
The door clicked shut behind her. Silence flooded back in, broken only by the hum of the laptop's fan and the distant city waking up. Kaito stared at his notes. Alternate choices. Counter-strategies. What I Would Have Done. A whole campaign plan laid out, step-by-step, correcting Aelric's perceived mistakes, optimizing resource allocation, predicting enemy movements based on the Pale Lord's documented patterns. A version where the kingdom didn't fall. Where the losses weren't absolute.
He ran a hand through his already messy hair. It was pointless, logically. You couldn't debug a tragedy. You couldn't patch a foregone conclusion.
Unless the conclusion itself was the bug.
He pushed the thought away, showered, dressed in the clean, unremarkable clothes of his quiet life, and headed out into the morning.
The tech office was an oasis of calm, muted grays and whites punctuated by ergonomic chairs and strategically placed plants. The air smelled faintly of coffee and server racks. "Morning, Kaito," echoed around him as he navigated towards his desk, nodding politely. He was the quiet strategist here too, the one who saw the flaws in the product, the gaps in the market analysis, the bottlenecks in the workflow before anyone else.
"Kaito, that bug report from the alpha build?" Kenji from QA leaned over his partition, looking stressed. "Did you see the logs? We can't replicate it consistently."
"Timestamped 03:47," Kaito said without looking up from his monitor, fingers already flying across the keyboard. "Memory leak related to the new API call. It's intermittent because it depends on server load hitting a specific threshold during the garbage collection cycle. Rolled back in the 04:15 push. Shouldn't affect the current sprint." He sent Kenji a link to the specific commit.
Kenji blinked, reading the brief explanation Kaito had typed. "Right. Uh... okay. Wow. How'd you even connect that?"
"Saw the commit notification timestamped 04:15," Kaito explained calmly, finally glancing over. "Cross-referenced the error logs from 03:47. Pattern matched the memory signature to the API leak issue flagged in the pre-alpha stress tests last month. Just connecting the data points, Kenji."
"Because he's Kaito," his boss, Mrs. Masami Katakura, said dryly as she walked past, dropping a file on his desk. Sharp suit, sharper eyes. "Good work on the quarterly projection adjustment, by the way. You made sense of Tanaka's optimistic mess."
"Just followed the data," Kaito murmured. "Tanaka's core assumptions were sound, just needed weighting for seasonal market variance and competitor response lag."
Mrs. Katakura San raised an eyebrow, impressed despite herself. "Right. Well, the execs liked the revised forecast. You always see three steps ahead. Ever think about moving up? Management track?"
He offered a noncommittal smile. "I think I can have a more direct impact on product strategy from this position currently, Mrs Katakura. Less time in meetings, more time analyzing the data." And the puzzles here, he thought, at least follow logical rules. Unlike Aelric's doomed campaign.
Just then, a junior strategist, Mika, hesitated by his desk. "Kaito-san? Sorry to bother you, but the integration plan for Project Chimera... we're hitting a resource conflict between Team B and Team C for the testing phase."
Kaito pulled up the project timeline, scanned it for a few seconds. "Stagger the testing," he said simply. "Have Team B focus on core functionality integration testing first for 48 hours. Team C uses that time for their independent module stress tests. Then swap. Reduces server load conflict and gives B time to patch any initial integration bugs before C hits it with stress tests. Send them the revised schedule."
"Oh! That... makes perfect sense. Thank you, Kaito-san!" Mika scurried off, looking relieved.
The day unfolded in a predictable rhythm – meetings, documents, quiet problem-solving. Beneath the surface layer of software strategy, however, his mind kept running simulations, replaying scenarios from the book. If Aelric had secured the Northern Pass in Year 3 instead of trusting the truce... If the Spirit-Forger artifact hadn't been lost at the Siege of Aeridor...
Evening brought dinner with Ayane at their usual noodle joint, the steam and chatter a welcome distraction. "So, Mrs. Sato gave us another pop quiz," Ayane complained between slurps. "And Kenji Tanaka keeps asking me about my brother the 'genius'. It's embarrassing."
"Just tell him I mostly fix printers," Kaito suggested mildly. "How's the physics project going?" He listened, offered advice, felt the familiar pang of guilt for the part of his mind still charting the fall of a fictional kingdom.
Later, bathed again in the monitor's glow, the guilt faded, replaced by the familiar hum of analytical obsession. Ayane was asleep. The city outside was a distant murmur. It was just him, the data, and the persistent, illogical pattern of Aelric's failure. He had the forums open, cross-referencing fan theories with the sparse 'author notes'. He had his own notebooks spread out, filled with dense script, flowcharts, maps marked with tactical symbols.
Why? The question wasn't just about the plot holes anymore. Why publish it like this? Why make the optimal path lead to failure? Why keep the author anonymous? Why did the source vanish after that single email?
He stood, stretching, walking to the window. Below, the city lights sprawled like a vast circuit board. He could see the flow, the connections, the logic in its complex system. He could predict traffic patterns, power grid fluctuations. Why couldn't he crack this? Aelric made the right calls – mercy when needed, ruthlessness when required, alliances, sacrifices. The text documented it. And yet, the Pale Lord won. It felt... deliberate. Artificial. Like a game rigged against the player.
"I would have found the exploit," he muttered to his reflection in the dark glass. Not a boast. Just a statement of fact based on his own nature. He didn't break rules, he found the flaws in their structure.
A faint flicker from the tablet drew his attention back to the desk. An itch behind his eyes, a sense of something misaligned, like a single line of corrupted code in the operating system of reality. He shook his head, dismissing it as fatigue. Time for sleep. He had a real job, real responsibilities.
He closed the forums, saved his notes, but left the tablet open beside his bed, the title page of Aelric the Last Flame glowing faintly in the darkness like a persistent error message. As his breathing slowed, as the city outside finally quieted, a whisper, colder than the night air, seemed to thread through the silence, unnoticed.
"Let's try again."